Potion Explosion appeared to me like the board game version of Bejeweled and I really had no interest in it. My wife and son played a demo somewhere and loved it. The Jolly fat man brought it on 12/25 and we got to put it together and play a few games.
PlayersThe game only supports up to 4 players. We have only played with 3, so I can't tell you how it plays with 2. I will say that I do not like to be the first player when playing this game.
ThemeThe witches and wizards create various potions to prove who is the greatest brew-master of them all. The marbles act as different ingredients required to make the different potions. There are only 4 ingredients, which to me doesn't seem like enough for a wizard or alchemist, but whatever. The theme could have easily been "beer explosion" with the marbles being grain, hops, top yeast, and bottom yeast.
How it worksEach player starts the game with 2 easy potion recipes. These are picked out ahead of time and the players pick their first potion clockwise and their second counter clockwise. So the first player will have the best and worst starting potions. During your turn you can drink a potion at any time. There are 8 kinds of potions with different affects, but you only play with 6 different potions in any one game. The potions let you steal ingredients from a rival, take a pair of different ingredients from the board, remove a certain color of ingredients from a row on the board, etc. Doing so does not trigger any explosions. You can also deduct 2 points from your score to remove any 1 ingredient without triggering explosions. During the main part of your turn you take 1 ingredient and hope to trigger explosions. Say one of the rows looks like this:
You could drink a potion or take the negative 2 points to remove the
Now you have:
If you take the
, the
meeples collide and all explode. Then the
collide and explode, so you get 6 total marbles to use in your potion.
KidsMost kids should be able to play this game and find it enjoyable. My son has trouble remembering to use the potions to increase the explosions created on his turn.
End gameThe end game is triggered by the removal of the last 4 point bonus chip. You get these chips for either A) Creating 3 of the same potion or B) Creating 5 different potions. When the end game is triggered, the round finishes and then ends. This is where the first player can have a disadvantage. If player 2 triggers the end game, player 1 doesn't get an extra turn to use all his/her potions to maximize scoring. The disadvantage is mitigated by carefully watching what other players have. Unfortunately for a small child, this can be hard to do so I recommend having the children go last.
ConclusionSo far I enjoy this game. It is much more fun and interesting than I first imagined. Everything made of cardboard fits together nicely and the game itself looks great. The company seems to have some quality control issues with the marbles though. We were missing black marbles and had quite a few damaged red marbles. Getting replacements from the company wasn't as easy as I would have hoped, but after a lot of back and forth with them, they did promise to send us the few marbles we needed.
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